A common problem that arises for consumers is to easily identify local merchants that can currently provide a particular item of interest, such as a product, service and/or information that is available for purchase, rent, lease, license, trade, evaluation, sampling, subscription to, etc. While various techniques exist for locating a merchant that might provide an item of interest, problems exist with these existing techniques.
For example, yellow pages directories, such as those created by local telephone companies or other private companies, are one place that people may look to locate potential merchants. However, a number of problems exist with such yellow page directories. As one example, such yellow pages directories are typically made available in paper form, and may not always be accessible when needed. In addition, even if they are available, the yellow pages are typically categorized at a high-level, and may fail to provide sufficient information to determine whether a particular category of merchant or a particular merchant within a category would sell or otherwise provide a particular item. For example, a consumer interested in locating a particular brand of golf ball may be unable to determine whether merchants listed under a general “sporting goods” category would even carry golf supplies, let alone the particular golf ball item of interest. Thus, it is typically necessary for a consumer to manually telephone multiple merchants to determine if the merchants can currently provide the desired item, which is time-consuming. Furthermore, such yellow pages directories typically do not provide information about merchants' hours of operation (e.g., to enable a determination of whether the merchant is currently open), and when the yellow pages directories cover large geographic areas, it is often difficult to determine whether a particular merchant is nearby.
Some online local search services have also become available via the Internet, but they typically suffer significant problems from incomplete and inaccurate data. For example, such local search services may rely exclusively on data from Web pages of merchants, which excludes numerous local merchants without such Web pages. In addition, even if a merchant has a Web site with one or more Web pages, most merchants do not list at least some items (and often any items) that the merchant sells on their Web site, and do not typically provide information about current stock or other availability of particular items. A very few merchants (e.g., some large national retailers) may provide some data regarding products that they sell via electronic data feeds, but such provided data will still typically lack at least some useful information (e.g., hours of operation for the retailer), and the participating merchants will typically not include merchants that provide certain types of items (e.g., at least some services). Thus, such local search services will often fail to identify local merchants that are currently available to provide a particular item, and even if such a search service is able to provide information about a local merchant that might carry a particular item, a consumer typically still has to manually contact each such merchant separately to determine if the merchant is currently able to provide the item (e.g., currently has a product item in local inventory and is currently open to sell the product).
Thus, it would be beneficial to provide techniques to improve the ability of consumers to locate local merchants that are currently able to provide an indicated item, as well as to provide other benefits.